Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Robertson Davies: erudite and entertaining

Martin Chilton

28 August 2015 • The Telegraph

I encountered the work of Robertson Davies by chance. Long before ipads or e-readers were around to divert, I had a long, slow, train journey from London to Dundee in prospect and gambled on a thousand-pager (a one-volume trilogy) by a Canadian writer I knew little about. His book made the journey pass so pleasantly that I went on to read his two other mammoth trilogies and was charmed and entertained by them all (Deptford, Cornish and Salterton are his big three trios). Davies was a writer Anthony Burgess hailed as "ingenuous, erudite and entertaining, with all the qualities of a latter-day Trollope". Davies was born in born Thamesville, Ontario, more than a hundred years ago – August, 28, 1913 – and although his books are still in print, and he was honoured in his centenary year by being put on a Canadian stamp, I wonder about the extent to which he has faded from view. The Salterton Trilogy, for example, was at number 344,186 in the Amazon bestsellers chart in August 2015. More